31 Lug La via dei Dahu

Logline
“When an Italian-American champion joins Italy’s Para ice hockey national team, the squad faces two years of purgatory between private lives and defeats, chasing its first Paralympic medal at the Milano Cortina 2026 Games.”

Synopsis

For twenty years they’ve been called the Dahu, after the legendary Alpine creature with mismatched legs, built to climb but incapable of walking straight. Founded for Turin 2006, Italy’s Para ice hockey national team has never won a Paralympic medal and remains one of the few non-professional squads among the sport’s major nations.

Holding it together are fragile balances between complex personalities, worlds apart in personal history and culture: captain Gigi Rosa, a calm leader who consoles teammates on the ice and, off it, measures out his days between work and family with the same steady pace as a mountain climb; Andrea “il Conte” Macrì, an aggressive, provocative defenseman who carries into every game the urgency of a life spared when his high school deskmate’s wasn’t; veterans Santino Stillitano and Gianluca Cavaliere, both over fifty, who guard the team’s memory and the legacy of its late founder; and Matteo Remotti, the youngest player, the locker room’s favorite target and its tenderest soul.

Two years before Milano Cortina 2026, Italian-American star Nikko Landeros bursts into the team, a three-time Paralympic gold medalist who lost his own legs in a teenage accident. His arrival shakes up the group’s balance and mindset just as Italy suffers its first-ever relegation to a lower division, under the strict eye of coach Mirko Bianchi, who insists on training athletes, never victims.

So begins a two-year purgatory of defeats, private lives, and internal fractures, a search to come back together and chase, twenty years after the team’s founding, the dream of a medal at their home Paralympics.